Social media: The Instagram rebellion
“Instagram sucks now,” said Kate Knibbs in Wired, and you can thank the Kardashians for making that clear even to the people who run it. This spring, Instagram released a test version of its app that replaces the regular feed with a full-screen stream filled with mostly TikTok-like videos. The audience has hated it, and last week the reality stars Kylie Jenner and her sister Kim Kardashian (total follower count for the two: 689 million, though presumably with a fair deal of overlap) shared a petition asking Instagram to “stop trying to be like TikTok.” Instagram’s CEO Adam Mosseri got the message and admitted the company had “messed up.” Jenner and Kardashian are not disinterested parties: Any shift in Instagram “poses a threat to their multimillion-dollar business interests” as mega-influencers. But in this case, they’re saying what ordinary Instagram users are feeling. “What was once a repository for photos of friends and family is now a junkyard stuffed with knockoff TikToks known as ‘Reels.’”
Instagram should just “go back to what it was good at,” said Helen Meriel Thomas in Vice—“letting everyone post nice photos and Stories, in chronological order.” Instagram used to be like “the chicer cousin of Facebook,” which lost the under-40 crowd when the “racist Boomers and conspiracy theorists took over.” But now Instagram isn’t fun, either; it won’t even “let me scroll two thumbs without showing me a random melting burrata.” And it still can’t compete with TikTok, which is a “more entertaining app” because its algorithm knows “everything about you” and what you actually like. A new app that bills itself as the “anti-Instagram” is now racing up the app store download charts, said Elizabeth Moore in Bloomberg. BeReal “requires all the people on the platform to take a photo within a two-minute window each day,” prompted by a push notification that it’s “Time to BeReal.” Its appeal, according to many users, is the spontaneity, and “its intentional opposition to the ultra-curated aesthetic of Instagram.” Unfortunately, the app has been racked with glitches that derail the experience.
There may be a small and temporary retreat, but Instagram and its parent company, Meta, will keep pushing Reels on us, said Amanda Silberling in TechCrunch. “Reels is a big potential moneymaker for Meta in a time when its revenue is starting to decline.” The video format keeps users engaged for longer and can reach more people, raising the odds that an advertiser could get its product to go viral. It’s no wonder Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said last week that the percentage of content that is served by Meta’s AI is expected to double by year end. “Who cares about the average user as long as stakeholders are happy?”